In 1909, Rutherford described the atom as a nucleus around which electrons orbit as planets do the sun, but while planets occasionally collide, electrons never do. A lead atom has 82 electrons whizzing around in close proximity but is stable for billions of years, so why don’t they ever collide?
A particle in orbit is also accelerating, so it should lose energy and spiral inwards, but again electrons never do. Why don’t the laws of physics apply to electrons in atoms? The standard model lets virtual photons shield electrons from the nuclear attraction, but how then do they stay in orbit? It also allows the miracle of wave-particle duality that lets electrons be particles in space but waves in atoms. A particle isn’t a wave, nor is a wave a particle, but this allows physicists to use the correct equations. Yet one wonders, how does the electron know to be like a particle in one place but a wave in another?
Apparently, electrons know Pauli’s exclusion principle, that they can overlap like waves if they have different quantum numbers. Quantum numbers let electrons co-exist in atomic orbits, but they aren’t based on or compatible with any other physical laws, as they were invented after the fact.
In contrast in this model, electrons are one-dimensional matter, and so are matter-like on one dimension but like light on the other two. Their matter dimension explains why they move slower than light in space, and can collide like particles, but on the two-dimensional surface of an atomic orbit, an electron can be like light, entirely wavelike. The “miracle” of wave-particle duality then arises from the matter-light duality of electrons. Hence, while a particle orbiting a center needs an agent to stop it falling in, a wave can pulse forever on a circumference that fits its wavelength. It follows that if electrons around an atom vibrate at different wavelengths, they will never collide (see next module).
Electrons as matter-light hybrids can be particles in space but waves in atoms without miracles, so they move slower than light in space but pulsate in atoms at the speed of light.